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Kyla Brinkley
Spenser Simrill
English 2340 Fall 2014
17 December 2014
Final Exam
“You Are Okay”
“All say, ‘How hard it is that we have to die’—a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.”
—Mark Twain, Puddn’head Wilson
I write because I cannot draw. Because I was not blessed with the ability to convey the thoughts in my mind through graphic images, I instead paint pictures with words, stringing them together to convey feelings and ideas that previously had no concrete form. The urge to convey those feelings is true of many writers: it is why they write. A literary work is essentially a window into a point in time, paused, in order to be shared and analyzed by generations of people much later. In the sense of this paused point in time, literary works are essentially photographs, or even time capsules. In opening one of these time capsules, the reader is immersed in the world that the writer created and invited to share their experiences and sentiments just as they occurred because photographs freeze time in the past yet they raise awareness to who we are and who we will become. This awareness comes from common themes that arise due to the inescapable dialogue between books that speaks for the connection all humans have with one another Brinkley 2 regardless of the era in which they live, and the common trait that we all share: we have had to live, and we will have to die eventually. Literature addresses and embraces this in an enduring dialogue between literary works of art that reassures us that our struggles are universal.
All writers share the need to depict images as frozen photographs in order to leave something for later generations and communicate with them. They feel the need to express an idea or a message about their time before it is forgotten in lost as the years flash by. Mark Twain wrote Puddn’head Wilson for this purpose. He wished to expose and satirize the Southern aristocracy the 19th century for those who were just starting to forget about what had happened forty years ago. When he wrote the novel, it already served as a reminder for the people of his time about the injustice of slavery that had been part of such recent American history, but it also serves as a snapshot into the shifting nature of Twain’s time. Twain’s opinions showed that blacks were just like any other person and that a white man raised as a slave (Chambers) could be no more intelligent than his black counterparts. Likewise, a slave raised as a white heir, like
Tom, could become a self-interested villain simply because of the manner in which he was raised. Twain’s novel drips with irony concerning the racial hierarchy of the Old South that is amusing even for readers today. At the end of the novel when Tom and Chambers are exposed for being switched and thus the opposite race, Twain described how “Everybody granted that if
‘Tom’ were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him—it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life—that was quite another matter. As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river….” (Twain) The ideas depicted here were considered wildly outrageous for both Twain’s original audience and later generations of readers, which support’s Twain’s “photograph” of the time. By instilling such irony into the novel, Twain forces the reader to step back from the story Brinkley 3 and realize that it is not a story at all, but a social criticism. Upon stepping back from an immersion into a writer’s story, the reader is forced to evaluate his or her own world in regard to the one depicted in the book. Twain included that “he was a fairly humane man towards slaves and other animals” in his initial description of Driscoll, Chambers’ and Roxy’s master. This causes a shock for readers, who are dragged deeper and deeper by Twain into the world of men such as Driscoll, realizing that Twain writes about real sentiment that is an enduring part of our history that we must acknowledge. It causes the reader to wonder what would happen should they actually have lived in Driscoll’s time, because this is the feeling that Twain instills.
As time continues its relentless journey people all have experiences and these experiences overlap and can be seen in different places at different times yet they have the same foundation.
This foundation is the root of the relatability of works such as Puddn’head Wilson and later ones such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Written in 1925, The Sun Also Rises describes the adventures of members of the “Lost Generation” of young people living in post-World War I
America (such as Hemingway himself). Characterized by feelings of purposelessness and aimlessness, this group of individuals was described by Gertrude Stein to Hemingway:
“In A Moveable Feast, which was published after Hemingway and Stein were both dead and after a literary feud that lasted much of their life, Hemingway reveals that the phrase was actually originated by the garage owner who serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car in a way satisfactory to Stein, the garage owner told her that while young men were easy to train, he considered those in their mid-twenties to thirties, the men who had been through World War I, to be a ‘lost generation’—une génération perdue. Stein, in telling
Hemingway the story, added, ‘That is what you are. That's what you all are...all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.’” (“The Lost Generation”) Brinkley 4
The idea of feeling lost, however, was definitely not new for this generation of people, and can be seen in countless personal experiences and other literary works. Even returning back to
Puddn’head Wilson, Tom’s struggle with his sense of self played a large role in the novel: “For as much as a week after this, Tom imagined that his character had undergone a pretty radical change. But that was because he did not know himself…In several ways his opinions were totally changed, and would never go back to what they were before, but the main structure of his character was not changed, and could not be changed”. (Twain) His mother Roxy also voiced the internal struggles of self-image and purpose that many of the characters in the novel experienced by addressing their light skin: “Jes listen to dat! If I’s imitation, what is you? Bofe of us is imitation white—dat’s what we is—en pow’ful good imitation, too…We don’t ‘mount to noth’in as imitation niggers…” (Twain) I believe Roxy’s opinion is especially important because there remain issue today in regard to passing: passing as in passing for something you are not. In reality, literature reminds us that we are all human and we share the same struggles anyway, and we can relate to the struggles of one another. In Charles Chesnutt’s The Passing of Grandison, the struggle of identity is explored in a relatable snapshot into the politics of Southern aristocracy, as in Twain’s novel, in a collection of stories published in 1901 entitled The Wife of
His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. Chesnutt himself being of mixed descent, “was born two years before the Civil War…” and “…gew up in a turbulent sociopolitical atmosphere, and experienced the futile attempts of Reconstruction of Southern states.” (“Charles W.
Chesnutt”) He understood the issue described by Roxy, stating that “I occupy here a position similar to that of Mahomet’s Coffin. I am neither fish, flesh, nor fowl-neither ‘nigger,’ white, nor
‘buckrah.’ Too ‘stuck-up’ for the colored folks, and, of course, not recognized by the whites.”
(“Charles W. Chesnutt”) This struggle for identity fueled stories such as The Passing of Brinkley 5
Grandison that explored the idea of seemingly being someone you are not. Although
Grandison’s role as a devoted slave turned out to be a façade, it demonstrated a very real side of the conflicts between abolitionists and slaves. Most of us hear more often of the struggles of slaves who yearned to be free rather than a slave wishing to evade freedom, as Grandison demonstrated. His vehement loyalty is shown in this dialogue:
“I should just like to know, Grandison, whether you don't think yourself a great deal
better off than those poor free negroes down by the plank road, with no kind master to
look after them and no mistress to give them medicine when they're sick and – and” -
"Well, I sh'd jes' reckon I is better off, suh, dan dem low-down free niggers, suh!
(Chesnutt 178)
It offers a parallel that increases insight into the realistic moral conflicts of enslaved people in the Old South that is nonetheless relatable for readers today. When slavery was all a person knew, it was surprising yet logical to realize that the prospect of freedom seemed daunting. Any reader today knows that new experiences can be frightening, which allows them to relate to even a slave like Grandison. However, finding Grandison’s fear of freedom so ridiculous throughout the story forces the reader to realize that his or her own fears of the unknown are just as obsurd.
However, Chesnutt evokes a plot twist in showing that Grandison was never afraid all along and as we smile at how he was never that naïve, we wryly thing about how we, on the other hand, were.
One Monday morning Grandison was missing. And not only Grandison, but his wife, Betty the maid; his mother, aunt Eunice; his father, uncle Ike; his brothers, Tom and John, and his little sister Elsie, were likewise absent from the plantation…On the stern of a small steamboat which was receding rapidly from the wharf, with her nose pointing toward Canada, there stood a group Brinkley 6 of familiar dark faces, and the look they cast backward was not one of longing for the fleshpots of Egypt. The colonel saw Grandison point him out to one of the crew of the vessel, who waved his hand derisively toward the colonel. The latter shook his fist impotently - and the incident was closed.
Because he turned out not to be who the reader thought he was, Grandison’s story allows
Chesnutt to address the idea of passing not only in the sense of color, as he himself experienced just as Twain’s characters Roxy, Tom, and Chambers did, but in any other aspect of life. The feelings of aimlessness that passing evokes are the medium through which these novels which concerned slavery connect with later works such as The Sun Also Rises.
In Hemingway’s novel, a different frozen photograph is depicted by Hemingway’s characteristic simple-structured sentences to create his own work of art. In The Sun Also Rises,
Hemingway demonstrates more directly the results of the hopelessness and loss of purpose that was introduced in the earlier novels. Brett Ashely, in particular, functions as a symbol for the recklessness and wild manner in which the members of the Lost Generation lived their lives.
Brett confides in Jake that she has “…always done just what I wanted,” yet at times her lifestyle of drinking and stringing men along catches up to her and she breaks down, exclaiming, “’My
God!’ said Brett, ‘the things a woman goes through’…’Oh, I do feel such a bitch.’” (Hemingway
188) Jake himself, the protagonist, also struggles with identity and what he feels his role in life should be. He can be very cynical, saying that “Nobody ever knows anything” and describing
Brett on one occasion by saying, “I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people.” (Hemingway 32, 39) The struggles of Hemingway’s characters are also highly relatable for readers of any age because as humans we share the need to feel alive and to feel as if we are doing something purposeful with our lives. The Lost Brinkley 7
Generation, like millions of others before and after them, feel as if drinking and travel and general recklessness are the only way to truly live and to forget about the doubts and sadness and pain that creep into the mind at night. Jake is aware of this pain and illuminates it for readers so that they can feel it too and feel exactly what his generation felt. Jake often writes about moments of clarity in which he describes a more introspective opinion of the lives of himself and those around him: “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime but at night it is another thing.” (Hemingway 42). By including the more personal insights of Jake and his friends and how they deal with life Hemingway contributes to the timelessness of the story that makes it more relatable for readers of any era.
Much of later literature has been influenced greatly by Hemingway and thus by those before him. Later writers started to become even more direct in depicting life just as it was at a certain point in time. Many years after the plight of the Lost Generation, the Beat Generation of writers came about in the years following World War II. Similar to the Lost Generation, the Beat
Generation was new and different and sought to change the norms of literature and society.
The years immediately after the Second World War saw a wholesale reappraisal of the conventional structures of society. Just as the postwar economic boom was taking hold, students in universities were beginning to question the rampant materialism of their society. The Beat
Generation was a product of this questioning. They saw runaway capitalism as destructive to the human spirit and antithetical to social equality. In addition to their dissatisfaction with consumer culture, the Beats railed against the stifling prudery of their parents’ generation. The taboos against frank discussions of sexuality were seen as unhealthy and possibly damaging to the psyche. In the world of literature and art, the Beats stood in opposition to the clean, almost Brinkley 8 antiseptic formalism of the early twentieth century Modernists. They fashioned a literature that was more bold, straightforward, and expressive than anything that had come before. (Rahn)
Jack Kerouac, one of the founders of the Beat Generation, proceeded leave his mark, or snapshot into Beat culture, by writing On the Road, a lengthy scroll written over the course of three weeks that contains no paragraphs whatsoever. It explicitly describes Kerouac’s travels, similar to those of Hemingway’s Jake, as Kerouac and his best friend Neal Cassady live life just as they want to as they search for meaning within themselves and the people around them. The sense of adventure, of traveling literally on the road by car is only possible in this time period. Post-
World War II sentiment contributes to this. It is also significant that Kerouac wrote the book on the long scroll not only to contribute to the flow of his consciousness but to create a literally symbol of a long road. This arguably would not be possible today. We cannot hitchhike as freely, the hippie culture is no longer there, it would be more expensive. The list goes on. This is not to say that something similar could not occur. There still exists a culture in which drugs and freedom and writing can coexist to tell a story. These stories are essential to preserving the aspects of America that usually are deemed inappropriate.
Kerouac’s story is also significant in regard to leaving a message for readers today in that it addresses interesting aspects of race. Kerouac often pursues women of different cultures, and in his travels works menial jobs and lives like a beggar simply for the experience:
“This was so much better than washing dishes on South Main street. But I knew nothing
about picking cotton…I thought I had found my life’s work.” (Kerouac 197) “They
thought I was a Mexican, of course, and I am.” (Kerouac 198)
Keourac simply wanted adventure and to get out into the world and live, even if this means discomfort and pain. He seems to find the good in everything, however, simply for the sake of Brinkley 9 adventure and experience. However, he doesn’t last long in this lifestyle. He simply wanted the experience for a while, to say it happened. This is significant because it leads him to appreciate the life he led before, and the journey he will continue.
This speaks for the journey that we all share as people as we search for meaning in our own lives and look at ourselves to decide who we really are, whether we are passing for someone else or not. The novel also makes the reader starkly aware of his or her own mortality because due to years of alcohol abuse during his reckless lifestyle, Kerouac died of cirrhosis: “Twelve years later, Kerouac was dead. The physical cause was cirrhosis of the liver, brought on by years of alcohol abuse. Many of those who knew him intimately, though, suspected that he also died of disillusionment.”
We will all eventually die, yet we choose to leave a mark on the world that those after us can share, because we will always share common human interests even after death such as the need to convey feelings through art in the form of writing or any other medium, the feeling of pretending to be something we are not, the idea of not knowing our own purpose, and the fear of death itself. Literature traverses these fears and desires to convey common feeling in a timeline that shifts and changes but which heads in one direction. As Puddn’head Wilson’s calendar said, we “…have had to live.” (Twain) We have had to and continue to struggle with ourselves and the world around us. The snapshots of life that writers create are essentially time capsules that contain the very soul of our own lives. The dialogue between literary works demonstrates the connection between those time capsules that preserve our history so that we won’t make the same mistakes; or if we do, we will know how to deal with it and be reassured that is had happened before and it is perfectly normal and sane. The motive behind creating something great is to express these triumphs and transgressions through any medium of art we can in order to Brinkley 10 leave something for other generations as encouragement. The following quote actually comes from the script of the popular television series Mad Men, but I believe that it conveys the encouragement that literature hopes to convey: “…do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing is okay. You are okay.” (Mad Men)
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Works Cited
"Charles W. Chesnutt." Charles W. Chesnutt. Chesnutarchive.org. Web. 17 Dec. 2014.
Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. The Wife of His Youth And Other Stories of the Color Line.
Charlottesville, Va.: U of Virginia Library, 1901. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. Reprint. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.
Kerouac, Jack, and Howard Cunnell. On the Road: The Original Scroll. New York: Viking,
2007. Print.
O'Hagan, Sean. "America's First King of the Road." The Guardian. The Guardian, 5 Aug. 2007.
Web. 17 Dec. 2014.
Rahn, Josh. "The Beat Generation." The Literature Network. Jalic Inc., 1 Jan. 2011. Web. 17
Dec. 2014.
"The Lost Generation - Boundless Open Textbook." Boundless. Boundless, 14 Nov. 2014. Web.
17 Dec. 2014. textbook/from-the-new-era-to-the-great-depression-1920-1933-24/the-roaring-twenties- 186/the-lost-generation-1027-4785/>. Twain, Mark. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. Champaign, Ill.: Project Gutenberg, 1894. Print.http://www.gutenberg.org/files/102/102-h/102-h.htm Mad Men. Perf. Jon Hamm. Wiener Bros, Silvercup Studios, Lionsgate Television, AMC Studios, 2007.